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othernaut · 9 days ago

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Character Creation Challenge, Day 14: Mummy: the Curse

Mr. Daler sat in his pickup at the edge of the impound lot, certain that he was going to get himself killed. The vast, illuminated space inside felt like another country, one defined by spotlights and blowing snow as much as any other would be by rivers and mountains. The open chainlink fence was as significant a threshold as the one between life and death.

"You have reached your destination," intoned the GPS, and he had. He eased the truck through the hanging gate, trying to ignore the distinct feeling that he was driving underwater. He pulled off to the side, into a space more delineated by the mush of muddy tire tracks than anything else. He clicked the car off, left the lights on. The sharp, black night outside the shear of illumination was something he didn't want to contemplate.

His hand fell on the binder in the passenger seat. The blue one. The bad one. Emergencies only. Christ, when he'd gotten the text, he'd been annoyed at losing his evening. He'd only just gotten home, his dinner left half-microwaved, his cat fed before he'd fed himself. He'd flipped through the first few pages while waiting for a freight train to pass. By the time the road was clear, a lot more things made sense.

They'd joked in the break room about Cobra Commerce being a cult. There were enough strategic anomalies to be notable; Mr. Daler had always chalked it up to the calcified boomers on the board being, at this point, more cocaine than human. Still, it kept the Gen Zers happy and engaged. They left little totems on top of the filing cabinets, big-headed vinyl things from media he couldn't hope to recognize. There, in his company truck, reading the bullet-point initiation into deeper mysteries, the joke inverted. The pillar became a pit. Every little anomaly explained as the occult action of some faux-Egyptian adoration of... what, exactly? Christ, he'd gotten his cat from a workplace adoption program.

Two loud echoes through the snow-pocked silence of the impound lot, resonant as dropped sheet metal, loud as gunshots. He acted on impulse, translating the sound into motion. Popped a breath mint, tucked the binder under one arm, and swept himself out into the shadow-haunted Ontario night.

There was a curdled familiarity to the lot; Mr. Daler was sure he'd been to this specific one before. Truckers were a lot of things, but temperate and consistent beings - not quite. Everyone knew what it meant when the guy with the clipboard and lanyards strode smartly over the lot. Someone fucked up. Someone got drunk in the wrong place, clipped the wrong road sign, drove 80 hours straight because Protestant Jesus told him that sleep was a sin. Someone needed to, at the very least, get the fucking truck.

Someone should have been there to see him in. Didn't matter the time of night, commerce waits for no one. Only drifting snow, pearl-bright in the headlights, and the sound of some steady, rhythmless beating noise in the far distance. Mr. Daler worked on memory, boots crunching in the frozen wells of tire tracks, making for the biggest, brightest building on the lot. He looked for the signage, Helvetica brown on pale concrete, leading him to administration. The door was open there, too.

He paused in the lacuna where the building's heat escaped into the night. A jumble of footprints in the entryway, the delineation between icy asphalt and slick blue vinyl tile. Mr. Daler wasn't a tracker, knew nothing of nature beyond the fact that it appeared to very much want to bite him, but there were... anomalies. A tangle of ridge-soled snow boots tracking mud and snow inside. A mat, just inside the door, kicked into the corner at high velocity. Little clumps of dirty slush on the edges, fresh. The incongruous but unmistakeable impression of a bare human foot in the tracked snow.

The binder's bullet point called him the Everyman, a poetic distillation of something far more ancient, and beneath the Temu packages and distilled water, the truck had been carrying its tomb.

A fluorescent flickered down the hallway. Strange that it took something so small for the familiar to become abominable.

He crunched his way inside and closed the door behind him. At this point, he was above his body, above the thumping heart and cortisol. He saw himself act, noted it with curiosity, but his motions seemed entirely distinct from his thoughts. He watched himself walk slow and casual down the hallway towards the flickering light and the thumping noise, as detached as if he were half-watching a horror movie while scrolling on his phone. The door at the end was open, too.

He walked to the threshold, stood there to take it in. A slow pan of the camera around a storage room. The shelves were steel skeletons, mostly empty; the overhead lights cast overlapping pools of intense brightness into the room's otherwise universal dim. Something, in a corner, was busy cracking something into the concrete floor. Mr. Daler was just remarking to himself that it was too large to be human when it unfolded itself into a distinctly human shape.

Not for the first time in his life, Mr. Daler cursed that, between flight and fight, his body would always choose to freeze. The creature was like if a child scribbled a human body with brown crayon. It must have been close to seven feet tall, broad-shouldered and lumpen, as if parts of its desiccation were paused around deposits of brown, buttery fat. It said something to him, something his high-dissociating English-major brain desperately wanted and desperately failed to figure out. It moved slow, smooth, with the heaviness of an industrial machine, if one could learn to walk.

Mr. Daler felt his fingers fiddling with the edges of the blue binder. He regretted that. He didn't particularly want to feel anything right now. Still, the top edge of his index finger was flicking against an outset bit of paper, and slowly, as if swimming up from a drowning depth, the thought rose to the surface: a Post-It. In the face of a surely agonizing and unusual death, he held up the binder, flipped it open to where the Post-It was marking the page, and tried to read. He had no hope of pronouncing what was written there, even with the helpful, italicized phonetic pronounciation guide. But there was a sign, caution yellow - the only color printed in the book.

He held it up like a talisman and the thing stopped its deadly approach to read. He could hear the black marbles of its dried eyes flicking back and forth as it took in the page.

Then it lowered its gaze. It wasn't looking at the paper again, it was looking at him. A wash of bullet-point revelations overcame Mr. Daler at that point, the contextless informational pellets rotating and reconfiguring into what absolutely failed to be any sort of conclusion. This was, at once, the culmination of the true purpose of a centuries-old cult that only masqueraded as a transport company, a horror movie come to life, some Halloween horseshit he'll forget as soon as whatever 7-11 ergot poisoning he'd gotten wore off, and a clear impossibility that, by existing, changed everything he'd ever be.

It spoke again, and this time he understood. The words it said weren't English, but they rearranged themselves in his brain into a helpful kaleidoscope of phrases. Mr. Daler knew, instinctively, that what the thing said was, "The priest has not yet proffered the hammer." Filtered through the knotted culture, context, and personal experience of the man witnessing and experiencing the thing, it came out as a low, slurred, growly trucker voice, the sort of thing he'd hear mumbling by the multitudes in his voice mail whenever taxes came due.

"What's the job, boss?"

*****

"Tor" Concept: Half-drunk, blue-collar story-gatherer, taking the long way to universal comprehension. Decree: Ren (name) Guild: Maa-Kep Judge: Bastu, the Stare Virtue: Charity Vice: Sloth

Attributes: Intelligence: oo, Strength: oo, Presence: ooo Wits: oo, Dexterity: oo, Manipulation: ooo Resolve: ooo, Stamina: ooo, Composure: ooo

Skills: Mental: Investigation oo, Crafts oo Physical: Athletics ooo, Brawl oo, Survival oo Social: Empathy ooo, Socialize ooo, Streetwise oo, Animal Ken o, Subterfuge oo Specialties: Carving (Crafts), Lifting and Carrying (Athletics), Motives (Empathy)

Pillars: Ab (heart) o; Ba (spirit) o; Ka (essence) oo; Ren (name) ooo; Sheut (shadow) oo Willpower: oooooo Sekhem: As many as is warranted. Memory: ooo

Defense: 2 Health: 8 Initiative: 5 Speed: 9 Willpower: 6

Affinities: Enlightened Senses, Affable Aid, Familiar Face Utterances: Command the Beasts, Words of the Amanuensis Merits: Language o (Latin, English), Guild Status oo, Cult (Reach oo, Grasp oo, Enterprise, Storied), Tomb (Geometry oo, Peril oo)

*****

In the piles and piles of unappreciated and unloved World of Darkness games, few reach the level of disgrace that the Mummy franchise does. It's a hard thing to fantasize about, being a notably dead and rotting creature whose major Western cultural touchstones are shambling stop-motion in racist old movies. I can sell the fantasy of pretty much every other WoD gameline, even the other ones where you play as a dead corpse, but Mummy remains the hardest to close on. Which is kind of a shame, as even the least-appreciated WoD property has something it wants to express, even if, in this case specifically, I don't think it's the thing it's necessarily trying to express.

In short, I've always read Mummy: the Curse as corporate horror.

The touchstones are identical. Outside the explicitly-stated core theme of memory, the major defining aspect of a mummy, the reason they were killed and brought back in the first place, is obligation. Moreover, it's all-consuming obligation, obligation that by its nature changes you, makes you better at fulfilling the terms of your service and worse at being who you are. Any time a mummy lives, it lives for its duty. A mummy has so little time to spend on its own wants, drives, and desires, and mostly spends that time recuperating the little bits of self it needs to remain animate, retain even the faintest blush of humanity.

Even that can be stolen, as the mummy can be called to task at any time. The people who made it this way are either long dead or so distant as to be actually mythologically unreachable, but the mummy is still expected to fulfill dictates and act according to principles that are, at this point, outdated by millennia. The idea of this ever stopping, of there ever being a reward for service beyond more service, is so laughably far-fetched as to be actual heresy. They don't understand what they're doing, they don't understand why, they don't even understand who they are anymore, and the best they can hope for is delegation. That's a corporate horror, baby.

The issue, then, the fatal flaw that keeps me from going, "It's good, actually," the same way I do for Changeling: the Lost, is that Mummy plays coy with its most compelling premise. The more I look at things like Severance, like Corp Borg, like Control, the SCP Foundation, and Triangle Agency, the more I note that one of the key tenets of success for corporate horror is obviousness. You have to move the awfulness out of subtext and into plain text. It has to be what you sign up for, the thing listed on the job description.

And with that, it has to leave room for absurdity. The horror has to be recognizeable, everyday, immediately familiar to anyone who's had to complete like six video training exercises on their own time - but that also comes with, like, drama over the breakroom cupcakes not being vegan, or someone being called in to the manager because they spent 7 minutes in the bathroom. Trying to be subtle about the horror that everyone playing your game has already lived through is why the hook fails to catch.

The horror of corporate horror is an aftereffect. It's getting through a day of stupid morale chants and indistinguishable paperwork, going home to your hot pocket and your half-finished regency drama and realizing, jesus fuck, I've spent ten years doing nothing for faceless capitalist demigods who I'll never meet, I used to have all these dreams and hopes for myself and now my ambition is limited to a four-day weekend and a six-pack of PBR, I've stopped creating anything, I've stopped meeting anyone, everything I am is limited to six cheap suits and an ever-increasing rent. The knife it wields is identity crisis and it shoves it in quick and hard while you're staring, still in your bra and with a head full of static, at the fridge.

There are other issues with Mummy - it tells a better individual story than it does a collective one, the mythology it builds is less immediately catchy than in other gamelines - but it's this fumbling of what should be a compelling central premise that puts it to bed. Like with a lot of games, I still think it's possible to tell a compelling Mummy story, but I'd have to do a whole lot of tinkering in order to make it compelling how I'd like.

Next up: An even worse idea.

#character creation challenge #new year new character #wod #mummy the curse #world of darkness #if horror is trying to capture a specific flavor of feeling then corporate horror and fridge horror are conceptual besties #so clearly we need to give mummies refrigeration technology #all problems solved forever

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